Lord, the number of crows gathering in the yard is alarming. They flick and twitch their beady eyes, surveying and waiting for something to die. They are eager, dressed and ever ready in funeral garb to gather and caw over their carrion. The murder is hungry.
Death is everywhere. How we love to devour the violence of it, scavenge the planet and scan the news for carnage we can consume in 24-hour cycles of news.
Were we not made to incarnate something other than trauma, trauma burned onto the backs of our eyelids, trauma replaying while we sleep and eat, wake and walk, scroll and scroll and scroll again?
How dare we keep multiplying violence when what you asked for was fruitfulness. Oh love, oh peace, oh joy, where are these bright and foreign fruits?
God of pierced skin and thorny crown, whose image of suffering has been formed and shaped a million ways, whose likeness lives in the stricken, the lynched, and the slain, forgive us for making entertainment of tragedy. Forgive us our mocking at your bleeding feet. Forgive us our banter and backs turned. Forgive us our dry eyes.
Though harrowing, crows are hallowed, part of your good creation. Crows don’t kill out of malice. Crows aren’t conspiring acts of wanton destruction. They sing your awful song of death and circle for survival.
From lifelessness, they make something rise again.
May we have the dignity of the crows to attend each loss in mourning clothes.
